Quagmires in SFT-RL Post-Training: When High SFT Scores Mislead and What to Use Instead
In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as "RL" below). In this work, we challenge whether high SFT scores transl…